[creullin]

They say on the FAQ:

>For every Lightsail plan you use, we charge you the fixed hourly price, up to the maximum monthly plan cost.

Wording implies the monthly pricing is a 'maximum' price.

[fabian2k]

Traffic is the big item that can add additional charges:

> Data transfer overages above the free allowance are charged at $0.09/GB.

On the $5 instance the second TB (at $90) is 18 times as expensive as the instance itself with the first TB included.

[kuschku]

Wow. That traffic is almost 50 times more expensive than at hosters of dedicated servers, or when you buy it directly from Tier 1 or Tier 2 networks.

Hetzner charges 1.36€ per Terabyte of traffic, and with most servers, gives you 10-20TB included.

I’ve heard people talk about the ridiculous traffic costs of AWS, but this is an entirely new dimension of expensive.

[fabian2k]

You get 30 TB traffic inclusive with the smallest Hetzner server that has ECC (4 core Xeon with 64GB RAM). And that is for ~70 EUR per month + setup fee.

That amount of traffic is more than 2000 EUR per month at AWS. Of course this is comparing entirely different things, but still, if you have significant traffic and can't avoid it with a CDN or something like that, AWS (as well as Google and Microsoft clouds) get seriously expensive.

[creullin]

I get that, but that's after the first TB. For a $5 VPS I'd expect most customers wouldn't go over that.

[Someone1234]

I'd agree. But it would be nice to have an option in the account settings so you literally cannot accidentally spend $90 on a $5 account.

[user5994461]

It's not expected... until your site get unexpectedly featured on HN, reddit or any news site.

[bendbro]

I'm pretty sure AWS only charges on traffic out.

Edit: just did some research, there are many cases this isn't true

[Someone1234]

That's just referring to the VPS itself. If you keep reading the FAQ you'll see that there are ways to exceed that amount.

Plus there's nothing stopping someone breaking into your account and upgrading it in all kinds of evil ways (which has been a huge hassle with AWS tokens being stolen from e.g. Github).

[beachy]

Really? What are these evil ways?

[shawabawa3]

There were lots of stories of hackers spinning up the largest ec2 instances available to mine bitcoins on anyone's account they could get access to

[jajern]

Not OP, but I've heard of people getting hijacked and finding a bunch of VPSs spun up sending out spam and other malware related stuff. Maybe that's what they mean.

[falcolas]

It's not; there are additional possible outbound bandwidth overage costs, and they are not insignificant.